Doors 7:00p
Program 7:30p
Tickets $12

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

We invite folks into the carefully crafted and layered narrative of Hyun Kyung Kim’s Defectors. It will be a special screening of her latest feature that intimately renders the ways in which the Korean War is still not over.

The film expands our understanding of “defection” through a multifaceted and generous prism of interpretation from looking to the past across familial trauma, to the most intimately personal present, to the observed experiences of those that Kim seeks out for shared understandings. Intertwining these experiences, she powerfully brings into relief the generational reverberations and hauntings of war with a deft and gentle unraveling.

The result is a raw and poignant film about recollection, aging, and the generational stories we carry. It’s both a sociopolitical and familial document with ongoing global resonances that only Kim herself could render with such intimacy.

The film was honored with a Special Jury Award at Visions du Réel and Best Documentary Award at Buenos Aires International Documentary Film Festival (FIDBA). We’re delighted to present it here for the first time in New York.

Docalogue writes, “the film attests to the capacity of the body to never forget. Kim grew up in a house where, as she mentions, the smell of the Korean War was “suffocating.” Recording technologies do not function in this manner. Instead, they function as prosthetic extensions of our own capacity to recall the past. Aging, the fear of loss, and the deterioration of the body, Defectors seems to suggest, compel a desire to be surrounded by meaningful things and media so that we will never forget.”

Cinema is certainly a way of remembering together, and we hope you’ll join us in the act of viewing together and stick around for a conversation with Hyun Kyung Kim following the film!

Program

Defectors by Hyun kyung Kim

84 mins, 2023

South Korean filmmaker Hyun kyung Kim grew up with the inherited burden of the Korean War, a conflict that left an indelible mark on her family and country. Her mother compulsively fills the house with items she finds on the streets of Seoul while her veteran father devours books about the war. The filmmaker’s encounter with a North Korean defector mirrors the story of her grandfather, who likely stayed in the North when the country became divided, never to be seen again by his family. Defectors confronts the impact of a brutal war on several generations of the filmmaker’s family.

Program Duration: 84 mins

Bios

Hyun kyung Kim is an independent filmmaker from Seoul, South Korea who has directed and edited four feature-length documentaries about people’s struggles under adverse social and political situations. Kim earned degrees in film at New York University and California Institute of the Arts and went on to direct numerous short documentaries for MBC, a South Korean TV network. Her films have won a number of awards and were screened in many international film festivals and art venues including The Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, FIDMarseille, Viennale, BAFICI, Busan International Film Festival, Visions du Réel and many more. She is a recipient of Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship in 2008.